A call for papers has been issued in connection with a 'PLAN-X' Workshop on Programming Language Technologies for XML. PLAN-X will be held October 3, 2002 in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. It is co-located with PLI 2002 (Principles, Logics, and Implementations of High-Level Programming Languages. October 3-8, 2002) and also with ICFP 2002 (International Conference on Functional Programming. October 4-6, 2002.) Chaired by Vivek Sarkar (IBM) and designed especially for the PLI community, the PLAN-X workshop "aims to bring together researchers from the programming languages and XML communities, to foster novel research to address unique challenges being posed by XML on current and future programming technologies, and to to exchange information on early research experiences with XML-related programming systems, tools, and languages." Rationale for the workshop: "... the robustness of current and future programming standards and tools for XML will depend on the strength of their foundations in core programming technologies e.g., XML parsing (parsing theory and incremental parsing), XML schemas (type systems), XPath expressions and XSLT programs (pattern-matching languages and their optimization), XSLT debuggers (dynamic program analysis and slicing). Since XML is a new domain, core programming technologies developed in past research cannot be used unchanged; instead, novel research is required to address the unique challenges posed by XML and its use in web applications and standalone applications."

Workshop description: "XML has emerged as the de facto standard for data interchange on the web. The use of XML as a common format for representation, interchange, and transformation of data poses new challenges to programming languages, applications, and database systems. During the last few years, the database research community has devoted a lot of attention to XML's data representation challenges, as evidenced by the number of XML-related publications in premier database conferences and journals. In contrast, the attention devoted to XML by the programming language research community has been minimal..." [excerpt]

ICFP 2002: "The ICFP conference provides a forum for researchers and developers to hear about the latest work on the design, implementations, principles, and uses of functional programming. The conference covers the entire spectrum of functional programming, from practice to theory, and from established functional programming languages (Scheme, ML, Haskell) to novel language designs and to the functional aspects of object-oriented or concurrent languages."